Lessons Learned in Playful Game Design – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education. Similar:Irrational Geographic : snopes.comBoosting the signal. This is a real Nati…BusinessIt's been a Dwarf Fortress afternoon. AwesomeNipper Hears "His Master's Voice"As a kid growing up in Fairfax County, j…BusinessTell Me a Smart Story: On Podcasts, Videos, and Websites as Writing AssignmentsIt…
One of my favorite comments from last year’s communal exploration of the source code for Colossal Cave Adventure. Stephen Ramsay writes: I’m going to call it the “Code on a Grecian Urn” problem. Let me begin by calling attention to Nick Montfort’s wonderfully pithy note at the end of Week 1:”Hm, I don’t know. The…
An article that addresses some under-examined stereotypes (smears?), while also pointing out some thoughtful alternatives. The Catholic Church, for example, has often been attacked as doing too little to help the Jews during the Holocaust. Yet on July 19, 1933, the Catholic periodical America published a strong article condemning Nazi persecution of the Jews. Dark…
Have you heard the one about a homeowner foreclosing on a bank? via Bank of America Gets Pad Locked After Homeowner Forecloses On It Similar:You’re Just Gonna Be Nice by A. LangeIn a study, over 1000 gamers were survey…CultureTwitter / Search – "couldn't remove your contacts" – All Tweets Twitter / Search – “couldn’t remove…
I have mostly a good first impression of the website touting MyPlate, the USDA’s replacement for the food pyramid. It wasn’t entirely clear that the items on the plate were clickable — probably because the graphic treatment of the plate resembles a button, and my brain said to me, “Oh, that’s a plate, how cute”…
Google, having failed to out-Facebook Facebook and to out-Twitter Twitter with Buzz, began a more modest attempt today to build social-networking features into its Web presence: the +1 button. —Google launches +1, a new social step | Deep Tech – CNET News. Similar:Sources tell Seton Hill University's Dennis Jerz that TV news websites emphasize self-prom…Sources…
Neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says Tuesday’s announcement, “dealt a blow to those who have long said, ‘There is no possible mechanism for cell phones to cause cancer.’ By classifying cell phones as a possible carcinogen, they also seem to be tacitly admitting a mechanism could exist.” Manufacturers of many popular…
During my research into the inspirations for and the writing of Charlotte’s Web, which took me back to White’s early childhood, I was intrigued by many aspects of his personality: his anxieties and hypochondria, his passionate defense of free speech and civil liberties, his one-man campaign for world government. But nothing else about him caught…
There will never be an easier way to break this to you other than to just say it: Facebook is not your friend. It’s a business. Repeat this to yourself until it begins to sink deep within in your social-loving brain cells. “Facebook is not your friend. It’s a business.” Laws on Internet activity and…
I do still see value in teaching students how to blog, precisely because academic blogging (as practiced by academics) involves reflection, citation of sources, interaction with archived posts from the past and current posts by peers on other blogs. Blogging, as a genre, extends beyond using any one piece of software. Being an “expert” on…
An interesting snapshot of what books some profs are teaching in thier lit classes, and why. I freely admit that the literary canon could still use some work, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the progress that’s already been made. For this project, I e-mailed a litany of professors in both English and some…
Students who are learning news writing for the first time sometimes overuse phrases like “so-and-so told reporters” or “when asked about X, so-and-so said…” Readers only encounter those phrases in journalism, so when students are new to news writing, they tend to reach for these phrases (and similar ones such as using “this reporter” as…
Portal 2 is essentially a demented series of puzzles – like being stuck inside a physics-based logic problem designed by the Python team; LA Noire is a trad adventure game. Adventure games used to be as close as gaming got to fiction. They started out as interactive text-based shaggy dog stories (a prime example being…
Everyone makes mistakes. As a student journalist, I completely muffed the last name of a faculty member I was assigned to interview. (A few years later, I found myself working a PR job, with that guy as my supervisor. It’s a small world.) So, with the full understanding that I am the pot calling the…
The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one…
Because the headline gets the name of the school wrong, it’s a little hard for me to assess this objectively. I’m glad Katie got so much space to share her experiences, and very glad this story mentions the importance of training and tech support. The story of my students reading Emerson’s Nature is a little…
If by “completes mission” you mean “makes us all sad by dying,” well, okay. It is not scientific or logical that I am sad because a cool little robot is dead on another planet, but it is human. This press release from NASA suggests that PR professionals are also apparently living on another planet, where…
Looks like all the content has been removed from literacyintheclassroom.com. This is good news for the other bloggers, who, like me, had no idea that entire blog posts were being republished by jacksonfish.com in order to support an ad for astorybeforebed.com. I am waiting to see whether jacksonfish.com actually publishes the comment that I left…
Here’s a comment I left on the jacksonfish.com website. Hello. I’m a blogger who was surprised to find that your site, literacyintheclassroom.com, scrapes my RSS feed and republishes my content in order to serve up ads for astorybeforebed.com. At least three of the bloggers whose content appears on that site did not give you permission.…
That line sounds like the title of a great blues song. The second verse isn’t quite so poetic. “Tears in space don’t run down your face,” he said, according to lead spacewalk officer Allison Bollinger who described the problem Feustel encountered when out on the spacewalk with astronaut Mike Fincke. “They actually kind of conglomerate…